Lit Motors’ E-Motorcycle Won’t Let You Down

Its designer calls it a rolling smart phone, it looks like an overgrown in-line skate and what it does is actually quite amazing.

Somewhere in a lab in San Francisco a team of engineers is hard at work on the Lit C-1, scrambling to get a working, drivable prototype of their remarkable vehicle ready by this spring. From the outside the C-1 looks like a tiny urban electric commuterconcept car, but give it a closer look and you notice that the thing only has two wheels and that it’s balancing itself.

image via Lit Motors

The brainchild of Lit Motors CEO Daniel Kim, the C-1 is a fully enclosed, two-passenger electric motorbike with an electronically controlled gyroscopic stabilizing system that allows the two-wheeler to stand upright even when stopped. Better yet, the stabilizer actually resists tipping, making it much more stable at speed, in turns and when bumped or knocked.

According to a Gizmag report, the C-1 uses a flywheel based system for stabilization. Located under the floor of the vehicle, the flywheels will spin, generating more than 1,300 pound-feet of stabilizing torque. This spinning force is the same principle that keeps a top upright and in the C-1’s patented system, driver input is processed to adjust the spin axes of the flywheel to assist in turning. Thanks to the gyroscopic effect, the bike is not only more stable than a motorcycle, it’s almost impossible to knock over.